The always awesome Colleen Carroll Campbell notes that strange things are afoot in Hollywood regarding its (collective) attitude about the (im)morality of abortion.
Here's the money quote:
It is noteworthy that the writers and directors behind these three films [i.e., Waitress, Knocked up, and Juno] — like those behind Bella, a more overtly pro-life film also released this year — are Gen Xers raised in the wake of the sexual revolution and the legalization of abortion. Under the cover of crudeness, their comedies pointedly mock the hollow values of their postmodern upbringing: the clinical soullessness of their sex education classes, the simplistic assumption that sex is just another contact sport for which condoms offer sufficient preparation and protection and the puerile fear of commitment and disregard for human life that feed our astronomical abortion rates.
This is something I'd noticed before this year, and it seems indeed to be a growing trend. Consider "Scrubs," where JD gets his girlfriend pregnant, and they actually have a debate about abortion, where having the baby wins out. It actually happens twice in the series; early on Dr. Cox and Jordan get together and have a child, and she decides to keep it.
"House" has explored the "choice" issue from the perspective of a mother who chooses to keep the baby a couple of times; there's actually a powerful scene where Dr. House, who has been skeptical of the baby's personhood, is operating on a mother (who is undergoing a high-risk surgery to save the baby), and the baby's hand comes out of the womb and grabs his finger. The expression on his face is amazing, and I was
floored that Hollywood would do this.
And on "Grey's Anatomy," there's an episode where a mother with sextuplets refuses to selectively abort one of them. She explains her choice with an ultrasound, showing how she's named all of them and describing their personality attributes, and asking the doctor "which one of them would you kill." And finally, in Grey's Anatomy, when Christina gets pregnant, she
initially decides to have an abortion, then struggles with it, and then finally the show resolves the issue by having an ectopic pregnancy burst her uterine tube.
This contrasts greatly with the 1980s, when movies like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" treated abortion almost like an afterthought. It used to be that lip service was paid to choice, while the abortion was routinely chosen. Now, things seem to be changing.
I've long thought (and this is not my original thought) that the most important strategy for pro-lifers is to change the culture, rather than the law, and indeed as a necessary precursor to changing the law. This seems to be some evidence that we may be winning.
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